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Loftness Adds Lightweight Mulching Head For Compact Excavators
Jessica Schwartz
Fall Fertilization Tips: One Size Does Not Fit All
Like politics, all lawn care in America is local—well, let’s make that regional. But you get the point. Consider the differences in turfgrass growing conditions from Cleveland to Miami to Oklahoma City. Each region is markedly different in seasonal temperatures, precipitation levels, soil types and the dominant turfgrass species most suited to their unique conditions. In other words, when it comes to fall fertilization, one size does not fit all. Lawn fertility regimes that benefit turfgrass in one region are wasteful and may even harm lawns in another. Also, soils in different regions of the country (even soils within a single region or market) may differ in terms of soil pH and plant-available nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium. Don’t guess. If you don’t know what’s in the soil, how can you accurately prescribe a fertility program that’s most beneficial to the turfgrass it supports? When in doubt rely on soil tests to show you the way, especially for new or struggling properties coming under your care. Personnel at your county extension office can help you with advice and soil tests. In many cases their services are free. Read about Soil Test Reports from the Winter 2020 Issue of Turf. Now’s the time to fertilize. Let’s start with the birthplace of modern lawn care, the Northeast and Midwest where cool-season grasses such as Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass and tall fescue dominate residential and commercial properties. If you can only fertilize these cool-season grasses once a year, do it in ...
Drainage & Retaining Walls
Retaining walls are useful structures that form a transition between areas of different elevation. Retaining walls allow steep, unusable slopes to be avoided. A retaining wall will make use of the vertical forces from the wall itself and any soil above the wall’s footing to resist the lateral forces from the soil being retained. This balance can be upset when additional lateral forces act on the wall. When water accumulates behind a retaining wall, the lateral forces acting on the wall increase. The more water that has collected behind a retaining wall, the greater the hydrostatic pressure on the wall will be. If the overturning moment (caused by the total lateral forces) exceeds the resisting moment (caused by the total vertical forces), the wall will fail. There are several ways to prevent water from building up behind a retaining wall. Weep holes should be drilled through the wall. Weep holes allow water to escape from behind the wall. These holes should be regularly spaced in the horizontal direction. Retaining walls with a height greater than a few feet should also have weep holes that are regularly spaced in the vertical direction, forming a grid pattern. Another method for relieving hydrostatic pressure is to install a drainage pipe behind the wall. This should be a perforated pipe, to allow water to enter it through the length of the wall. The pipe can be located just above the footing, or can be located at a higher elevation. Taller walls may require ...
Work-Life Balancing Act
Whatever the season, lawn care and landscape pros are busy with one aspect or another of business and operations. This past summer, Turf spoke with Chant Singvongsa, owner of Singvongsa Landscaping in Jackson, MN, founded in 2009. In this interview, Singvongsa shared insight on how he balances work during the busy season (and year-round), as well the drivers behind the growth of his business over the past 12 years. Turf: How did you get started in the lawn care and landscape business? Chant Singvongsa: The idea for starting this business occurred when my wife and I bought a home and needed to mow our lawn. I purchased a 21″ Craftsman lawnmower. To help pay for it, I knocked on my neighbors’ doors offering to mow their lawns. After slowly growing the number of homes I was servicing, this turned into a side business. Eventually, I secured enough customers to make it my full-time focus and was able to quit my factory job. Today, my landscaping business employs four people and offers complete lawn care, landscaping, hardscaping, snow removal, and tree trimming. Through my landscaping business, I discovered my passion for sharing what I was learning about entrepreneurship and started a YouTube channel—Chant’s Daily Hustle—where I show my more than 27,000 subscribers what it takes to start from nothing, build a successful business, and positively influence others. Turf: When you started out in the landscaping business, what did you expect to be most challenging? CS: When I first started my landscaping ...
Performing A Tree Species Analysis
Do your clients have too many of too few tree species? Probably. An overabundance of just a handful—such as elm, eucalyptus, Austrian pine, ash, silver maple and linden—is problematic. With species-targeting maladies such as Dutch elm disease and emerald ash borer, over-reliance on a particular tree, tempting as it may be, usually leads to big problems. Any property can be greatly improved with an evaluation aimed towards achieving greater tree diversity. Have The Conversation Among the services you provide to clients, is a tree species diversity analysis one of them? Or maybe that’s not the right term. “Right Trees, Right Place” or “Let’s Grow the Good Stuff” might get the point across better to customers. When you’re making the pitch, use terms and concepts they can relate to, such as an HVAC service contract. Create the analogy that periodic landscape assessments are essential to the continued health of the plantings, just as regular heating and cooling system inspections ensure equipment is operating efficiently. When the time is right, a walk and talk with the property owner is a great opportunity to point this out and transform problem plantings into a profit center. Create A Simple Sketch No expensive tools are needed for this one—just a sketch pad, or graph paper, and a pencil. Identify each tree and plant grouping and look for ways to introduce a more diverse group of species. A simple tear-off pad with your company logo and contact information on it will help keep the notes you ...
Three Tree & Shrub Pests To Watch
Last December, a CNN article declared 2020 as the year of scary bugs. But 2021 has perhaps been worse with the return of the infamous murder hornets, 17-year-dormant Brood X cicadas, spotted lanternflies, and more. Unfortunately, pests can sabotage the enjoyment of outdoor spaces. And 75% of people deemed outdoor spaces as indispensable this past year, according to a survey conducted on behalf of TruGreen by OnePoll. To ensure outdoor spaces remain a place of reprieve, here’s the latest information on some of the most problematic invasives that affect trees and shrubs. Emerald Ash Borer Originally from Asia, the emerald ash borer (EAB) was first discovered in the Detroit area around 2002. Strong flyers, they have since spread to 35 states (AL, AR, CO, CT, DE, GA, IL, IN, IA, KS, LA, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, Nebraska, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, PA, TN, TX, VA, WV, and WI) and four provinces in Canada. Though half an inch long, the metallic green EAB causes great damage to the circulatory systems of green, white, and black ash trees. Adults emerge in late May (or earlier in warm weather), with females laying eggs shortly thereafter. Upon hatching, larvae quickly bore into the tree, feeding on the cambium and disrupting the tree’s vascular system. Feeding damage inhibits the tree’s ability to transport photosynthates, water, and nutrients between the roots and leaves, resulting in canopy thinning, branch dieback, and epicormic sprouting. Often, EAB presence and damage may not be obvious to clients ...
Fall Leaf Mulching
For those in landscaping, fall is one of the hardest working seasons of the year with shorter daylight hours, large projects wrapping up, and the tsunami of leaves which “need” attending to before the snows fall. But what if the annual ritual of leaf clean-ups was reexamined? What about a simpler method, with a better understanding of the entire landscape, that leads to less labor, more profit, and satisfied customers? The Why When it comes to fall cleanups, you tend to see a lot of young bravado on display. I say that with certainty because in my younger days, I was long on biceps, but short on wisdom and learned intelligence. Then, in 2003, while walking in the woods one day, I noticed there was hardly a sound at my feet. The leaves hadn’t started falling yet and there was virtually no leaf litter on the forest floor. I leaned over, looked more closely, and noticed the remnants of skeletonized leaves—and lots and lots of worm cast. Hmm, I had never thought about what happens to leaves in the woods? As a landscaper, leaves were something one got all pumped up about in October, something that had to be handled, literally, in the coming weeks. “Leaves are bad, I’ve got to clean them up,” was the mindset. Around 2000, I had downsized my business. Gone were the leaf vacuum trucks, the workforce, and most of the equipment, so how was I going to handle leaves with a body that wasn’t ...
Tree Services: Taking Tree Care To New Heights
Editor’s Letter It finally happened this summer. Standing on my porch, a flicker caught my eye and there it was—a spotted lanternfly (SLF). I had been reporting on these invasives for several years, but had never encountered a live one in my area, let alone my yard. But I knew they were coming. Inevitable. While SLF was new to me, I had been witnessing the impact of hemlock wooly adelgid (HWA) for months in my hikes along the Hudson Highlands in NY. Quiet, sacred stretches of forest, whose shady understory was once dotted with the gorgeous “redwood of the east,” were clearly showing the effects of this Eastern and Carolina hemlock-killing insect with no native predators. It’s heartbreaking. Factor in emerald ash borer (EAB) and other invasives and quite simply, the very existence of some native trees is at risk—as we learned with the catastrophic American chestnut blight. Yet in today’s global village, the influx of such threats is an ongoing problem. SLF, HWA, and EAB, are detrimental to our forests, yards, and communities, so learning early identification and proper treatment are key not only for your tree care clients but for ongoing biodiversity. When it comes to promoting biodiversity—and with the abundance of species selective insects—John Fech, a horticulturalist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, offers a perspective on the need for a greater variety of trees, or plant palette, on landscaped properties. Better yet, he takes you step by step through the process of performing a tree species analysis, ...
Six Ways To Improve Job Bids
Creating better and more accurate landscape bids should be a top priority of your sales team. Accurate and timely bids based on precise job costing data can put you on track to building long-term relationships with your clients—and lead to more profit. Here are six keys to making your next bid a winning one. 1. Be Consistent Bidding better is all about consistency—consistency in the way you’re measuring your job sites and consistency in the job cost data that you’re referencing. Whether you’re heading out and walking to your sites with a hand wheel or using GPS technology to measure off satellites, your consistency and accuracy in counts and measurements is how the bid starts off the right way. If you’re not using job costing software to track your cost data, Excel is the most common tool. If you’re already using Excel, it’s essential that all your estimators use the same spreadsheet and the same version. Whatever your method, the spreadsheet or software should accurately reflect your labor and materials costs. 2. Know Your Costs Know your actual job costs. As mentioned above, the job costing spreadsheet or software you use should include accurate costs for labor and materials. For materials costs, which can fluctuate depending on where and when you’re purchasing, make sure you’re capturing your costs as accurately and as often as possible. A job costing software may have the capability to track how much you’re actually spending, average your costs, and calculate your costs automatically. There are ...
My Landscape: Urban Greenery At NYC Hospital
With well-being the focus, the new hospital tower at NYU Langone Health includes a landscaped entrance plaza and generous terrace. In 2018, the opening of the Kimmel Pavilion at this Manhattan healthcare facility included design elements that provide access to natural light and open space. Sponzilli Landscape Group of Fairfield, NJ installed plantings, trees, and hardscape. Here, Sponzilli Landscape Group shares the project background and the decisions behind installation. Opened in June 2018, the newly constructed Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Pavilion, part of NYU Langone Health system, represented one of the largest scale projects in Manhattan in recent years. The inpatient facility is for adult and pediatric patients, and the project owner set access to the outdoors and greenery as an important goal. Hargreaves Jones (formerly Hargreaves Associates) was the landscape architect on the project, collaborating with building architect, Ennead Architects. Sponzilli Landscape Group located in Fairfield, NJ, handled the entire landscaping installation. Located at 1st Avenue and 34th Street in New York City, the Kimmel Pavilion hospital tower includes a one-acre ground level arrival plaza and a 26,000-square-foot outdoor terrace on the seventh level overlooking the East River.The ground level area includes an arrival garden and plaza that blends seamlessly next to vehicular arrival and drop-off. The seventh level terrace includes gardens, outdoor dining, and spill out space for conferences and other events. The terrace also includes dedicated space (an outdoor classroom, gardens, and interactive elements) designed specifically for pediatric patients. Meanwhile, resiliency planning was incorporated ...
Get Equipped: Spreaders, Sprayers & Seed
Here are some of the latest Spreader, Sprayer & Seed introductions! Companies also exhibiting at GIE+EXPO, held October 20-22 in Louisville, KY, include Booth numbers. For more Get Equipped product introductions, including other GIE exhibitors, see GIE+EXPO Preview, Snow & Ice Management and Small Engine & Handheld Equipment. STARR From Go Seed STARR, a Kentucky Bluegrass from Go Seed , has earned #1 in Turf Quality, #1 in the Transition Zone, and #1 in Seedling Vigor for three years running at the Kentucky Bluegrass NTEP Trials. Highlights of this solid performer include rapid establishment and year-round turf density. Starr’s winter color is superior to that of many elite type bluegrasses and has early spring green up characteristics, making this bluegrass one of the best in summer performance available today. 50 Gallon SG46 From Steel Green Manufacturing Steel Green Manufacturing has increased the liquid capacity of the SG46 zero-turn sprayer/spreader from 30 gallons to 50 gallons, and it still fits through a 48″gate. It has all the power and spreading capacity of Steel Green’s largest model, the SG52, in a more compact size. In addition to the new liquid capacity, the SG46 sprayer/spreader holds up to 320 pounds of granular products with its Spyker 220-pound hydraulic-driven granular system and dual high-density poly fertilizer trays. A 23.5 HP Kawasaki engine rounds out the SG46. Other features include its: 3-section variable spray control (up to 8’); variable spread width (up to 25’), 200,000 sq. ft. coverage per fill (based on using ¼ ...
